This disclosure relates generally to digital content processing and particularly to capturing video highlights in sports videos by tracking a viewer's head rotation movement and synchronizing a video capturing device (e.g., a mobile phone) on a rotary station with the viewer's head rotation movement.
With the advancement of mobile computing devices such as smart phones and tablets, more and more people are able to record videos of various types of events, such as recording sports videos and sharing video highlights in the recorded sports videos with others. A video highlight of a sports video is a portion of the sports video and represents a semantically important event captured in the sports video (e.g., a short video clip capturing goals or goal attempts in a soccer game video).
Steadily recording a long sports event by a viewer using his/her smart phone and tablet can be challenging. One of the challenges is from the difficulty of capturing rapid movements in a sports event over a large sports field. For soccer, basketball, baseball, hockey and other similar sports, the sports field is typically very large and players spread out across the large sports field. Thus, viewers/audiences of the sports event have to frequently turn their heads to track the players' activities during the sports game/event. Another challenge is to predict when a video highlight is to happen in a live event. Thus, in order to capture an unpredictable video highlight in a sports game/event or a live event, a viewer has to stay alert for the whole sports game/event, which can be tiring, frustrating for missing the highlights of the sports game/event, and degrading the joy of watching the sports game/event.